Gop`s `West Point` Trains Guns On `86

September 25, 1985|By Lea Donosky, Chicago Tribune.

WASHINGTON — The students say the party may run it, but it`s no party school. They work from dawn to dusk and on weekends. The campus is a high-rise office building across the Potomac from the nation`s capital, and the curriculum includes ``demographics and vote history,`` ``building winning coalitions``

and ``registering new voters.``

A ``diploma`` certifies its graduates as the nation`s first professionally trained campaign workers.

Welcome to ``Campaign U.,`` officially known as the Republican Congressional Campaign Academy.

``We hope this will become the West Point of American politics,`` said Rep. Guy Vander Jagt (Mich.), chairman of the National Republican

``In a few concentrated months, we think we can develop the finest cadre of campaign professionals in America,`` Vander Jagt said, though he acknowledged that at first a college for campaign workers sounded like ``a far-fetched idea.``

Hoping that professional campaign workers will increase the number of Republican-held House seats in the 1986 election, the committee will spend $1 million over the next year to train 140 of them in campaign management, finance and communications.

Vander Jagt said six finance managers already have completed the 10-week course; 35 students from 20 states still are in training in the 3 programs, and more than 100 others will be recruited for programs through next summer.

The current students range in age from a 57-year-old Florida woman to Robert Salazar, 19, of Las Vegas, N.M., who wants to be a campaign press secretary because, he says, ``politics gives me an opportunity to make a difference in society.``

Students are promised a stipend of $300 a week, job-placement assistance and a career in which you ``go without sleep . . . and forget to eat because the raw excitement keeps you going,`` according to a recruiting film.

Pictures of Republican Party heavyweights who began as campaign workers, Vice President George Bush among them, flash on the screen as an announcer intones: ``There`s no better place than the campaign trail to find out what you`re made of, meet exciting people and most of all to make a difference.``

The committee also has prepared a color brochure saying: ``We`re looking for people who want more than a challenge. Men and women who thirst for the cutting edge between winning and losing. Professionals who want to make politics their business. Not their hobby.``

Prospective students must submit an application to the Republican Congressional Campaign Academy and provide essay answers to hypothetical campaign problems.

One question, for instance, asks how the students would go about raising campaign funds when the Democratic congressional opponent is a veteran city council member with extensive contacts with all the major city contractors.

Vander Jagt said students are not required to submit to a ``litmus test`` to show they are Republicans, and he expects Democrats will try to infiltrate his school. ``I wouldn`t be a bit surprised if they tried to sneak someone in,`` he said.

Vander Jagt said the latest move in the party`s drive to gain a majority in the U.S. House was born in seminars after the 1984 elections that focused on the ``great shortage of skilled campaign leaders.``

``We think this kind of effort is going to have to be matched or imitated,`` Vander Jagt said.

Political parties run various kinds of training programs for campaign workers, but they are not as comprehensive as this one.